NVIDIA PhysX may be ported to OpenCL

Posted on Friday, March 27 2009 @ 16:04 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA Director of Product Management for PhysX, Nadeem Mohammad, said in an interview with Bit Tech that his company may port PhysX to OpenCL in the future.
Mohammad revealed that he wasn’t against the idea at all. “In the future it’s a possibility that we could use OpenCL,” Mohammad told us, but added that “at the moment CUDA works great.” Mohammad also pointed out that although Nvidia currently uses CUDA to accelerate PhysX on GPUs, the company’s “architecture allows for acceleration by other things like OpenCL.”

“Nvidia works very closely with The Khronos Group,” said Mohammad, explaining that “actually Neil Trevett is president of the group and he’s part of Nvidia - so we’ve been driving that standard also, and it’s an excellent standard.” What’s more, later on, Mohammad also described Nvidia’s future plans for PhysX by saying “as and when we do move to OpenCL,” which implies little doubt that Nvidia is seriously considering this as an option.
This could potentially give users of ATI graphics cards access to the PhysX technology, but Mohammad added that he has no idea what the performance would be like. While referring to the GPGPU performance of ATI cards in Folding@Home, he suggested that ATI is "a couple of generations" behind in GPU computing solutions.


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Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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